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The drop for older hardware can be a problem for some people. My laptop has a HD 4250 that's intergrated and a HD 5470 that's discrete. So can I install the Catalyst 14.3 beta? Nope, at least according to the drivers. I imagine it wouldn't be any different in Windows either. So for now I use open source drivers, cause they actually work.

That HD 4250 chipset was used for sometime. There are people with discrete HD 6000 and 7000 cards that use a intergrated HD 4000 for low power savings.

It's obviously not official drivers for this hybrid on Windows, but those custom drivers will work:http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=372799
It's actually two drivers combined: onboard GPU will use legacy drivers and other will use most recent mobile Catalyst.
As long as I know those custom drivers works great for games and any other activity.

Left to "just" the open source drivers ? I can't believe you typed that with a straight face.

Everyone wanted open source drivers instead of Catalyst and now we're complaining that we have to use the open source drivers ?

"Just" the open source drivers ? Sorry, I still can't believe you said that.

*bridgman bangs head on desk

You are right, open source driver is great, but I still want to run Team fortress 2 in Linux as good as windows does (in my hd4200) It use to run a bit better in mesa 9.2 some months ago, its weird.
I hope more performance stuff will come to the r600 in the future.

You can't compare it because Windows have WDDM that have compatibility options and even include some backward compatibility.

Actually AMD legacy drivers on Windows have those awesome options:

Lot of small not fixed glitches especially on Vista.

GPU lockup on HD3XXX in some applications.

Built-in drivers of Windows 8/8.1 have no OpenGL support.
Those can't be replaced automatically with installer.

Installer bugged like hell and usually can't replace old drivers properly.

No official support for hybrids with HD4250 as noticed above.

Might be open source drivers lack of performance and some features, but in terms of stability they're better that Windows legacy driver.

The installer problem is present with the averidge versions too.. xD
But with catalyst legacy on windows 8, I have more performance than on linux, and no glitches, like gpu lockups under ubuntu, slow performance with xv, and can't play the majority of steam games on linux.